L’eredità dello scrittore Heinrich Böll e l’opera di Dieter Forte. Paesaggi del Dopoguerra tra desolazione e speranza

The article welcomes the observation of the Germanist E. Lämmert who suggests that great scandals and literary controversies can, after decades, revive interest in cultural issues that have remained latent, thus providing an important ethical rethinking on the facts that connect literature to history and therefore to the memory of the past. Sebald’s theory from the 1990s on the limits of horror translatability and on the German responsibility for the taboos in relation to the Bombenkrieg at the end of World War II has that effect. From the distance comparison between Heinrich Böll and Dieter Forte, children of two different generations, it appears that a common need for truth about the past prevails over any added effort to obtain realistic effects in their literary narrative. Furthermore, the reference to a Stunde Null as the moment of caesura between the end of the war and the reconstruction phase, dilating the meaning of the state of material and moral emergency to a timeless dimension, is nullified in their intentions.